Meet a Guide: Free Guided Meditation

For me, meditation provides the simplest, richest, and most effective window into whatever issues are most urgent and troubling in my life. It doesn’t matter what I’m struggling with — meditation almost always helps. I’ve used meditation for:

My goodness! I wasn’t expecting the list to be so long when I started making it.

My Experience With Meditation

And understand that this is all just in the past year. Before last summer, I meditated very infrequently — almost never, in fact. Don’t get me wrong: my mother introduced me to self-hypnosis around the age of nine or ten, and I used it in high school to work past my outer layers of shyness. But in college and afterwards I hardly used it, except for every simple Zen-inspired breath work occasionally to calm myself down. It just never occurred to me to use it.

Last summer, though, I suddenly found that I had a huge amount offear that seemed to be coming out of nowhere, and I just couldn’t handle it. I struggled for months before I finally managed to bring it under control with a meditative technique I stumbled on at Steve Pavlina’s site called Go To Your Room. You can read about my further adventures with this issue here.

Kinds of meditation

Peace meditations. This is actually a series of three meditations done in succession that I designed for myself to break away from the fears created by my ego, infuse myself with compassion, and re-connect with the living universe.

Visualization meditations. In these, I use vivid visualization to connect with Spirit.

I do the “emptiness” meditations whenever I do yoga, since I find it’s a great way to round out the practice. Lately I’ve been doing it once or twice a day, since I’ve started doing more yoga as part of my physical manifestation overhaul. The “peace” meditations (described in the “My Favorite Meditation” series of posts) I do just once or twice a month, since they’re a sort of last-resort method of getting myself out of a rut of depression or fear, which happens less and less frequently these days, thank the gods! The visualization meditations I do once or twice a week, whenever I feel like there’s an issue I need help with.

Troubles at First

Don’t let me give you the impression that I’ve just dropped into visualizations with no trouble at all. Oh no! While I haven’t had any trouble with the visualizing itself, I’ve had a fair bit of trouble maintaining a true connection to Spirit while doing so. What do I mean by that?

If you meditate without a “true connection”, the images you get are disconnected, and sometimes disturbing. The information you get from them doesn’t really resonate, and you feel uncertain about it. The scenes you see, and the characters you meet, seem more random, and less trustworthy. You may get the impression that someone or something is playing tricks on you, just trying to hold on to your attention.

If you meditate with a “true connection”, the images flow smoothly; they are never disturbing, although they may be odd or inexplicable; the information resonates, and you can feel — emotionally — that it is important and true. The experience leaves you with a feeling of peace and, frequently, companionship.

Getting that “true connection” was frequently hard at first. I would start down the path into the woods and find myself being stalked by some kind of beast; I’d turn to meet it, and it would bare its teeth at me, or change into a horrible image of a skull, or some other nonsense. At first I wondered what these images meant, and tried to work with them in a deep way, but I realized that the feelings I got from them were that they were trivial and not worth bothering about. They only appeared when I was feeling tired, upset, fearful, or otherwise at a “low” vibration. Some may call these evil spirits, and others may say that they are just reflections of the ego’s fears. In any case, I learned that the best thing to do with them was ignore them, and they would disappear immediately. If, for whatever reason, I simply couldn’t do that, I ended the meditation and tried again later, when I was more at peace.

This Guided Meditation

I’ve described a lot of my visualizations at length on this blog, and many people have told me that they enjoy reading them and wish that they had similar experiences when meditating. I was struck in particular by this incident that Kullervo mentions on his blog, in which he tried a visualization and ended up with his time wasted by one of those attention-grabbing fear-spirits. I wondered if there was some way that I could help people get the same benefit that I’ve had from this practice.

In this meditation, I lead you gently into a relaxed state, and then take you through a series of images designed to help you feel happy and fearless and loving. Only then do I bring you to a place where you can meet a guide. If the meditation is successful, you will have no chance of meeting any awful beasties, and — if not immediately, then with practice — you should be able to establish a good connection with Spirit.

You can go into this meditation with a particular guide or spirit in mind that you want to meet with. Alternatively, you can simply see who shows up! If there are guides with good intentions out there who wish to contact you, then they will probably jump at this chance to communicate with you.

Please let me know how it goes, and don’t be afraid to give me feedback, or let me know where you’ve had trouble. I’ve inflicted this meditation on three people so far, all of whom have enjoyed it, but got very different results:

My wife, who is much better at focusing on sound than on vision, got very relaxed and happy, but could only get brief flashes of “someone tall” when she tried to meet someone.

Kara-Leah met a different kind of guide: “My four year old self turned up… we chased each other around the bench and played in the flowers and climbed the tree and had a chat… it was wonderful.”

Slade said, “Your voice is wonderfully suited to this format. Your voice is warm, calming, authoritative, benevolent…”. He has a lot of experience meeting guides, but he found that the meditation opened him up to enable him to receive a message from someone else’s guide who had been trying to reach him.

Finally:

If you’re looking for more downloadable audio meditations, you can’t start at a better place than Kara-Leah Masina’s great article here. Not only does she provide in-depth reviews of ten meditations, all freely available online — she also chose mine as one of them, thereby showing her usual impeccably discerning taste.

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27 thoughts on “Meet a Guide: Free Guided Meditation”

I’ve downloaded the meditation, but unfortunately I can’t try it just yet since I’ve accidentally murdered my headphone 🙂
I suck at meditation, though I’m good at visualization, so I hope your sound file can help me with this.

Thanks! It’s so great to have AUDIO for a meditation. Frequently I find meditations written out in books, and when I go to try out the meditation I spend so much time worrying that I will forget the “script” that I can’t relax! Recording my own voice doesn’t work either, because then I end up thinking, “do I really sound like *that*?”

Nathalie, I also do better at visualization. Some days, I visualize the tasks on my To-Do list so well that I have trouble remembering if I actually did the tasks or just *visualized* doing them.

I am really enjoying this meditation. Plus I often use it at the end of a yoga class, taking my students through it verbally when they’re in savasana. I have had some great responses from them, and have told those interested where to find it on the internet.

Going to do it right now! (Doing it at least once a week and LOVING IT)

I did this meditation and really enjoyed it. Like Gia, I do meditations from books and have a hard time letting myself get into because I have to remember what I’m supposed to be doing, so it was really nice to just listen to you and it resulted in a much deeper and quicker relaxation.

I thought the addition of the people around the fire that you walk past was quite wonderful and made the meditation feel really safe. I won’t go into the details of what I saw, but I had a very good conversation with my guide.

Though I feel I should say that I noticed that the garden, a formal English number with low box hedges, was filled with white trumpet lilies. My guide turned to me then and said, “Of course! This is Mr. Lilly’s meditation after all!” 🙂

I may be subconsciously preventing myself from allowing this to work (influenced by a previous jaunt with a restrictive religious practice), and I wonder…

Do the Gods respond to our thoughts, or must our requests during meditation be voiced? If I would like to address the Gods, or even my Guides, should I speak aloud, or is simply THINKING enough for them to respond?

Tamara, thanks for coming by! … The gods can definitely respond to thoughts; no words are necessary. That said, sometimes forcing your questions into words can clarify them for you; and gods respond better to clear questions than to vague ones.

Hi Jeff. I really love your meditation audio, It’s so vivid, and I happened to love beach as well so it really works!

The guides are pretty strange, none of what I expected. I met 4 spirit guides. The only one I recognized was the adult girl, brunette and green eyes, wearing conservative dress because I always drawed her when I was a child, and I even saw her in dream when I was 14. She is my longest time staying, recognizable spirit guide. I thought she had left years ago, but apparently not! 😀

The other three are pretty unusual. One guide was a star person guy, blonde, in a spacesuit looking like soldier. He messaged me, “be strong in your pursuit and don’t give up quickly”. The other one was a skinny bald man wearing glasses, with stern expression on his face but pretty friendly. He looks like Star Trek-ish, only much more earthly and wearing black sweater. Then the last one was….. a little girl? I started thinking whether it was my deceased little sister, she died while she was born. She looked shy, and her cheeks are chubby. I’ve never seen her before. Can a spirit guide be a little 10-year old girl?

Theo, thanks for letting me know how it went! Those are some fascinating guides! It’s great you got to see a guide you recognized and felt familiar with, and saw some new faces too. And yes, a 10-year old girl can definitely be a guide, as can dogs, birds, etc. These guides may speak to some part of your consciousness that is more basic / primal / childlike; they may not speak in words, but use images or feelings directly, or may silently lead you in meditation to places you haven’t been before. The girl you saw may indeed be your sister, at least in some sense; or she may be a reflection or part of your own childlike self; or some mixture of the two — the boundary between self / non-self in meditation is very fluid.

I love this guided meditation. I actually enjoy the imagery so much that I have used it several times in meditation, specifically to just calm the mind and hang out in my garden.
My first experience my guide met with me. He appeared first as a large and majestic shadowy figure. A native chief in full head dress. At first only feelings were exchanged, as I started to become more comfortable he became less shadowy, more vivid. As the layers of shadow came off so too did his large presence, as well as head dress disappeared, until he was just a man sitting with me on the bench. I asked him if that was his true form, as he has appeared differently to me in dreams. He said it was how I wanted to perceive him at this time. We held hands for a while. He basically told me that I already have the answer I’m looking for. We walked around the garden, laid on the grass and listened to the sounds of the birds, ocean in the background, and the faintest muffled sounds of people on the beach. He held me firmly at one point and said that our time together is almost over and whether I had any further questions. I asked him again what I need to do. He said, “you know what you need to do.” We hugged and kissed and sure enough there you were to direct the rest of the meditation. It was such a wonderful fulfilling experience! (My second time no guide came to me) as I said I’m happy walking down through that beach to my secret garden just to hangout during an open ended meditation.
Tonight I will be going in for third attempt to connect with my guide.
Thank you for the awesome meditation!